BS"D
YESHIVAT HARA'AYON HAYEHUDI
Jerusalem, Israel
HaRav Yehuda Kreuser SHLIT"A, Rosh Yeshiva
PARSHAT DEVARIM/SHABBAT CHAZON
8 Av 5768/8-9 August 2008
TIME TO GET OFF THE FLOOR
The Rambam opens up his Book of Laws of the Temple by writing: “It is a
positive commandment to build a House for the L-rd dedicated to offer
sacrifices and for the Children of Israel to come up to three times a year,
as it says: You shall make Me a sanctuary”. He goes on to give details of
what is needed in order for the Temple to function. No mention is given of a
certain time when this commandment has to be fulfilled, or more importantly,
no mention of a particular person who would be needed in order to fulfill
this commandment - a commandment, by the way, in which a full one third of
all the Torah commandments are dependent.
On the other hand, the Rambam writes in the Laws of Kings: “King
Messiah in the future will return the kingdom to the house of David, he will
rebuild the Temple and gather in the dispersed of Israel.”
There seems to be a contradiction: Is it a commandment for us to build
the Temple, or can only the Messiah build the Temple, and we will have to
wait until he comes?
At first glance, it seems a bit strange that we would be in the need of
the Messiah to build the Temple, as we do not find a prerequisite for
fulfilling any other commandment in the Torah. Moreover, we do not find any
of the prophets coming along and nullifying a commandment; just the
opposite, they came to return us to our roots and rebuke us for not
fulfilling them. When the Jews were lax in rebuilding the Second Temple, the
prophet Haggai came to them and said in the Name of G-d: “Is this a time for
you yourselves to sit in your panneled houses, while this House lies in
ruins”? Now, if the Messiah was needed to build the Temple, when did Hashem
send the prophet to the Children of Israel that they should build it?
Certainly the Messiah was not around during that time period?!
And so we find that the commandment to build a House for G-d, first
given to the Jewish people in the desert, was immediately fulfilled with the
construction of the Tabernacle. Upon entering the Land of Israel, on the
very first day, the Children of Israel set up the Tabernacle at Gilgal, in
order to start the communal sacrifices right away. This continued almost
without interruption for the next 800 years! And when the Jewish people
returned after the Babylonian exile, the very first thing that they did was
to rebuild the Altar and start the holy Divine work. In all of these cases,
no one waited around with their hands in their pockets until someone or some
better time came along to fulfill G-d’s commandment to build a Temple.
Some might say that not all Halachic authorities hold like the Rambam,
who said that it is a positive commandment to build a House for Hashem in
every generation. That, though, is not the case, for we do not find any
Rishonim - early Halachic authorities - that disagree with the Rambam. The
Minchas Chinuch, for example, writes: “Also today, it is possible that if
the kingdoms of the nations of the world grant us permission to re-build the
Temple, it is a mitzvah to build.”
If building the Temple is a commandment like all other commandments in
the Torah that one must fulfill without any prerequisite, why, then, does
the Rambam in his Laws of Kings write that the Messiah will build the
Temple?
First, one must understand that the Laws of Kings are unlike the rest of the
Rambam's work, as the Keshef Mishna (Rabbi Joseph Karo) writes that what is
written here in this chapter of the Book of Kings are not laws per se, but
should be understood as such. The Rambam himself writes in this chapter:
“One does not know how these events will unfold until they do, for even the
prophet did not see clearly about this time period.”
Secondly, we see that the Rambam also writes that Messiah will return
the Jewish people back to Israel. Now after 60 years, in Israel today we
have Jews from the four corners of the earth - that is an undisputed fact -
though we still wait for the Messiah!
For the past 2000 years, the Jewish people had no choice but to sit and
weep on the floor over our Holy Temple. Tragically, today we continue to sit
around and weep over the Temple, when with not so much of an effort, we
could be bringing the daily sacrifices on the Temple Mount.
It seems that it is so much more convenient and easier for people to
fast on Tisha B'Av once a year, and then say: Well, what can I do, the
Rambam says you can’t build it today; or to say that the Temple will fall
out of the sky. Then we can go home and watch the Olympic games with a happy
heart. The truth, though, is far from this, for there is no commandment
given the Jewish people that we cannot do, and for this reason it is a
commandment - so we should fulfill it.
The Talmud Yerushalmi teaches us: When will Messiah come? Forty years
after the Temple will be rebuilt, will we find him dancing on the roof of
the Temple building! This Tisha B'Av, let the words of the prophet Haggai
ring in all of our ears: Will you sit in your panneled house, while the
House of the L-rd sits in ruins? And let us arise from the floor and do
something about it - Come, let us build the House of the L-rd!
With love of Israel,
Levi Chazen
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